If you were enrolled at the Bee Lavender Academy of Etiquette, lessons of the day would include punting, puppetry, and Don Quixote.
It appears that locals call homeschooling “home education.” Despite the fact that I dwell in the center of intellectual life, in a city where private tuition enjoys an illustrious history, nobody as yet has claimed any vague understanding of what we are doing. Acquaintances just look startled and uncomfortable.
The average resident of any Pacific Northwest neighborhood is more conversant in the history of radical education.
Summerhill is in England, people!
In other educational news, you might recall that my eldest has only attended school for approximately eighteen months of her entire life, while periodically acing cognitive and placement tests. She dropped out of art school a couple of years ago but decided to return to the academic trough to finish up A levels in preparation for university…. and is now enraged to find that she is an “Oxbridge candidate.”
For those far away from such niceties, this means that her scores and aptitude and demeanor have placed her in a defined track, where she is expected to apply to either Oxford or Cambridge. And if you can, then you should, says received wisdom.
Except she doesn’t want to. She says they are both shit, and beneath her contempt.
This is so far from my experience of life I can’t do much except laugh.